»Could the Bolsheviks have been defeated in 1917?11/11/13 14:17 from HomeThe Institute of Modern Russia continues its series of articles by a renown publicist Alexander Yanov, dedicated to the history of Russian nationalism. In this installment, the author explores the reason for the 1917 Revolution and concl...

Demonstrators protested and scuffled with police in Moscow after the killing of a young man that residents blamed on a migrant from the Caucasus. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Yegor Shcherbakov probably didn’t expect to become Russia’s newest national figure. But on October 13, the 25-year-old ethnic Russian turned into just that after he was stabbed to death by an assailant from the Caucasus following a personal dispute in Russia’s capital, Moscow. A full-blown race riot followed, complete with chants of “Russia for the Russians” and “White Power” and the destruction of a shopping center. In all, Moscow police ended up arresting some 400 people, most of them far-right nationalists seeking revenge against foreigners in Russia, and launching a city-wide dragnet for the perpetrator.
The incident was hardly an isolated one, however. Recent years have seen a marked increase in xenophobia, racism, and violence against non-Slavs within the Russian Federation. The reason, experts say, is widespread anger over economic stagnation and corruption. It is also a reaction to a surge of migrant workers from Russia’s “near abroad” of the Caucasus and Central Asia. With foreign arrivals now totaling 13 to 14 million, Russia’s migrant labor force ranks second only to the United States.
But whereas the United States largely assimilates its immigrants, Russia does not. According to research conducted by Mark Ustinov of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, nearly 70 percent of Russians exhibit negative feelings toward people of other ethnicities, and one in five believes that they have no place in Russia at all.
Most Russians, moreover, want their government to do something about it. A nationwide opinion poll carried out by Moscow’s respected Levada Analytical Center in November 2012 found that nearly 65 percent of respondents favor some form of restrictions on labor migration.
Not surprisingly, race-related violence in Russia has surged in recent years, especially in Moscow and other cities. Last year alone, 18 people were killed and nearly 200 were injured in racist attacks throughout Russia, according to estimates by SOVA, a Russian human rights watchdog group. But experts say the real number is probably much higher, since most attacks go unreported.
The rise of ethnic violence in Russia has been propelled by a surge in extreme right-wing nationalism. Historically, nationalist ideas and rhetoric have pervaded Russian politics, empowering derzhavnost—the idea of Russia as a great power—and helping to define a sense of self among the country’s citizens during turbulent economic and political times.
Yet today’s far right in Russia goes far beyond the nationalist rhetoric espoused by parties like Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and Dmitry Rogozin’s now-defunct Rodina (Motherland) faction. It is made up of an assortment of small, violent neo-Nazi groups and “political nationalists,” such as the Russkiye movement and the Novaya Sila party, that promote an ethno-nationalist agenda in Russian politics.
These right-wing groups, moreover, are growing in influence. “Although the extreme right remains a marginal phenomenon in Russian politics up to now,” Alexander Verkhovsky of SOVA has written, “it is a widely held view in Russian society that nationalism is an ideology with a future and will gain more popularity in the years to come.”
The Kremlin has been a willing accomplice to these trends. The government of Vladimir Putin has sought to harness nationalist sentiment for its own ends, and so—even as it has cracked down on the most violent offenders—has nurtured and cultivated nationalist ideas among the Russian population. In the process, it has spawned youth groups like Nashi, Walking Together, and the Young Guard; groups whose members, experts say, tend to share a common vision with Russia’s ultra-right.
But such nationalism isn’t simply a far-right notion. More and more, Russians from across the political spectrum are identifying with (and organizing around) a national identity tinged with racism. “The level of xenophobia today is rising among various social groups,” Russia’s Civic Chamber, an official civil society oversight body created by Putin in the early 2000s, noted in its 2012 annual report. “An especially sharp rise can be observed among the citizens of major cities and among those people with a high level of education. Their phobias relate first and foremost to migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and are motivated by ‘insurmountable’ cultural differences.” The result has been the creation of what one specialist has dubbed a “fashion for xenophobia” throughout the country.
Against this backdrop, this weekend’s violence in Moscow provides everyone watching with a telling glimpse into the true state of ethnic and religious relations that now predominates in Putin’s Russia. It isn’t a pretty picture.

Two Russian nationalists who threw a tomato at visiting Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima at a concert in Moscow have been charged with petty hooliganism and may face 15 days in prison, officials said.

(CNN) -- Lyudmila Romodina and Oleg Klyuenkov, LGBT activists from the northern Russian port city of Arkhangelsk, hateRussia's anti-gay "propaganda" law but they don't support the idea of a boycott of the Sochi Olympics in Russia as a way of ...

One person has been hospitalised after an apparent attack on an LGBT group in St. Petersburg, reports say. The attack occurred late Sunday evening when two men entered the Laskai LGBT centre and opened fire from traumatic pistols — high powered, ...

Carved from black granite, the memorial features a picture of David Tartikoff—aRussian immigrant who relocated to Malden and later became one of the first U.S. Marines to serve in France in World War I. Tartikoff died ... of the Russian Empire. The ...

PARIS — When the Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, was trying to warn Poland against joining the NATO military alliance in the 1990s, he laced gallows humor with veiled menace. “We know we can't stop you joining NATO. And you know that we ...

In mid-October, ethnic Russians rioted at a vegetable market in the southern Moscow neighborhood of Biryulyovo, hunting down mostly Muslim migrants from within Russiaand without to attack. The unrest was set off by the killing of an ethnic Russian...

But to get a grip on what is really happening in Russia now, we need to look beyond the dramatic and violent manifestations of nationalism—the race riots in Moscow's Biryulevo district, the attack on a Moscow-Dushanbe train, or marchers calling for ...

"Some political forces are using radical Islam to weaken our state and to set up conflicts controlled from outside on its territory, which polarize ethnic groups and whip up separatist sentiment," Putin told a meeting with Muslim leaders in Ufa, in Bashkortostan, ...

On November 4, Russia celebrates its annual Unity Day. For years, the holiday has been overshadowed by right-wing extremists, who protest against immigrants. This year, the atmosphere is particularly explosive. Russian nationalists shout as they attend a ...

The US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul is apparently losing a fight against mounting rumors predicting his untimely resignation before the year’s turn.

The diplomatic community expects the chief of US diplomacy in Russia to announce his resignation on November 16, which will mark the 80th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

McFaul has recently refuted this claim, but the rumor still persists.

An influential Russian newspaper Izvestia has cited its sources in Putin’s administration as saying the announcement will be made during some formal reception in the Kremlin, although there have been no suggestions as to its nature. The paper said however the Kremlin meeting may ultimately focus on McFaul’s future in Russia.

Maxim Minayev, of the Moscow-based Foundation for Civil Society, told the Voice of Russia that only President Obama was in the position to nominate ambassador candidates.

“Career diplomats usually head diplomatic missions for three to four years. None of US ambassadors in modern American history has stepped down of their own accord. Obama has the exclusive right to revoke ambassadors, something he has never done before.”

“Even if it was his [McFaul’s] initiative to quit, it will be Obama who will in the end announce the decision to replace him. He will also have to find a solid ground to do that, because the discharge of an ambassador who was appointed in 2011 is a heavy blow to the President and his choice of candidates,” Mr. Minayev said.

The ambassador appointment process in the US is quite a complicated one. A candidate for the position of an ambassador must first be endorsed by several committees with the US Department of State before he or she is voted on by the Senate.

If the Senate doesn’t confirm the appointment within three months, the President’s nominee is removed from the waiting list.

Michael McFaul was appointed as the US ambassador to Russia only after the second try, following his defeat by Republicans who accused him of sharing too much of European defense shield details with Moscow.

US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul is going to leave his post in Russia, Gazeta.ru reports referring to sources close to the Russian power structures. Perhaps McFaul will leave around Christmas. However it is not clear yet which post he will receive in the United States.

US officials do not confirm the reports about McFaul completing his diplomatic mission in Russia in December, but Russian sources report that the Stanford scientist appointed Ambassador to Moscow by Barack Obama is returning to the US.

According to some data, McFaul is tired of fighting with situations out of his control. For example, he has difficulties with stating his position on Russian television. On the other hand, outside of television, the Ambassador has recently shown no activity, too, and, as they say, it is connected with the fact that Washington overshadows the activities of its diplomats in Russia. They say it is better to be silent in order not to anger Russia. Last year's ban on the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans, which turned into a nightmare for both Americans and many Russians, despite all efforts of diplomats from both sides, has brought no loosening up.

There is also another version: McFaul's old friend Susan Rice has invited McFaul to return to a decent position in Washington.

Finally, one more version is that McFaul just wants to go home, to his family, to calm scientific work. Before joining the diplomatic service, the 50-year-old McFaul was a Professor at Stanford University specializing in Russian politics.

If McFaul leaves the post of the Ambassador, this will be the shortest term of tenure in recent years.

A Russian officer is seen pointing a gun at a Greenpeace member as activists try to climb an Arctic oil platform run by Gazprom. Photograph: Denis Sinyakov/Greenpeace

The FSB is much more than just an ordinary security service. Combining the functions of an elite police force with those of a spy agency, and wielding immense power, it has come a long way since the early 1990s, when it was on the brink of imploding.

Today's agency draws a direct line of inheritance from the Cheka, set up by Vladimir Lenin in the months after the Bolshevik revolution, to the NKVD, notorious for the purges of the 1930s in which hundreds of thousands were executed, and then the KGB. As the Soviet Union disbanded, the KGB was dismembered into separate agencies, and humiliated. The security services were forced into a new era of openness and researchers were allowed into the archives for the first time to investigate the crimes of the Stalin period.

Many of the brighter or entrepreneurial KGB operatives left the agency in the chaos of the 1990s, using their contacts and know-how to enter the business world as security consultants, fixers or businessmen in their own right. They included the current owner of the Evening Standard and the Independent, Alexander Lebedev, previously a junior officer working out of the Soviet embassy in London, who used his knowledge of how international financial markets to make his fortune.

As the 1990s wore on the agency got back on its feet and in 1999 Boris Yeltsin asked its then director, Vladimir Putin, who had recently been catapulted into the top job after a career in the service's lower echelons, to become prime minister.

With Putin as PM and then president, much of the FSB's power was restored. Many of his former KGB colleagues ended up in senior positions in government or at the helm of state-controlled companies. Lower down the chain of command, a blind eye was turned to FSB generals enriching themselves: it was no longer necessary to leave to earn a good living. One top officer complained that the secret service "warriors" had become "traders".

Despite its reputation as a slow-moving bureaucracy, the FSB has long taken on geeks who can help it stay ahead of the game technologically. In a time-honoured tradition, the agencytrawling the final-year students of the country's top technology institutes and inviting the best graduates to apply.

The agency has its own special institute known as IKSI, the Institute of Cryptography and Protection of Information, which used to work on code breaking but now focuses on information security. Its page on the FSB website boasts that more than 200 professors work at the IKSI, teaching students everything there is to know about computer systems and security. The only downside for computer whiz-kids is that salaries in the FSB, officially at least, are far lower than they would be at major tech firms.

Unlike the KGB, the FSB is not in charge of foreign spies. The responsibility for running agents likesuch as Anna Chapman and the nine other spies caught by US authorities, has passed to a separate agency, the SVR. But internally, the FSB has an extraordinarily wide remit.

When alleged CIA operative Ryan Fogle was caught with a blond wig and a compass, apparently attempting to recruit Russian counterintelligence officers for the US this year, it was the FSB who picked him up, interrogated him and released a humiliating video.

Its border guards, who have been under FSB control since 2003, stormed Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise in September, descending from helicopters wielding guns and knives. The agency is also strongly involved in combating "economic crimes", and is responsible for most counterintelligence operations. Western diplomats report a huge rise insurveillance and harassment from people they presume to be FSB agents, with foreign journalists and businesses also targeted.

The agency still operates from the Lubyanka, the central Moscow building notorious during the Soviet era for interrogations in its basement cells. There are no official figures on how many people the FSB employs, but the security services expert Andrei Soldatov estimates the number to be at least 200,000.

After the 2006 death of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning, in which Scotland Yard strongly suspected some level of state involvement, Britain announced a moratorium on all co-operation between the FSB and British security services. This stayed in place until May, when David Cameron paid a call on Putin at his summer home near Sochi. The leaders agreed that with the Sochi Olympics approaching, Britain would resume "limited" co-operation to ensure the security of competitors and spectators.

MOSCOW, November 11 (RIA Novosti) –Russia's top anti-drug official said Monday his agency had helped a team of international law enforcement agencies catch a Mexican drug kingpin suspected of trafficking at least 30 tons of cocaine. On October 28, a ...

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MOSCOW, November 11 (RIA Novosti) – Russia's top anti-drug official said Monday his agency had helped a team of international law enforcement agencies catch a Mexican drug kingpin suspected of trafficking at least 30 tons of cocaine.

On October 28, a joint team of officers from Nicaragua, El Salvador, the United States and Russia tracked the movements of the internationally wanted trafficker from Costa Rica to El Salvador, Russia’s Drug Control Service head Viktor Ivanov told reporters Monday.

The suspect was later arrested at an airport in El Salvador’s capital and deported to Nicaragua, Ivanov said.

He said that the alleged drug lord is suspected of trafficking some 30 tons of cocaine from Costa Rica, mainly to Guatemala, profiting at least $200 million.

Two Russian nationals have been added to the FBI cyber criminals most wanted list. One is wanted for hacking US based firms and stealing confidential data including employee identities, while the other one for infecting PCs in more than 100 countries.

Uralkali chief executive Vladislav Baumgertner was directly responsible for acrime that has damaged the Russian budget, the Investigative Committee said, leveling charges that could see the central figure of an international potash dispute jailed for ...

According to a WikiLeaks cable sent to the State Department from the U.S. embassy in Moscow about Lieberman's visit to Russia in 2009, Israeli deputy foreign minister Yuval Fuchs “cemented Moscow's impression that the Russian-speaking Lieberman is one ...

Government sources are worried that any crack in the sanctions could open the Iranian economy to those who want to do business with the Islamic Republic, such as China andRussia. Shalom Yerushalmi weighs in on the negotiations and concludes ... Just ...

(From a video posted by WikiLeaks). Mr. Myers quotes me correctly. Unfortunately, the immediately preceding sentences quote aRussian journalist, who “cautioned” that the appearance of a “happy, open asylum” could be “propaganda,” and that the Russian...

According to Russian law, even a suspended sentence would eliminate Navalny frompolitical office for life. Navalny lambasted the trial, saying during the Wednesday session that the original sentence had been handed down "on instructions from Moscow" ...

Alexei Navalny, President Vladimir Putin's most charismatic critic, has transformed himself from a hard-hitting anti-corruption blogger and street protest demagogue into a polished political campaigner with designs on the presidency. However, his ...

“The statement of the minister of The Netherlands is a major blow to the reputation of Russian politicians,” said Lev Gudkov, the director of Levada Center, a Moscow-based, independent polling organization. “For now, though, their greater part prefers ...

Ten years ago, Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested at gunpoint on board his private jet. In the decade since he has gone from being Russia's richest man, to its most famous political prisoner. From inside the prison camp where he is being ...

Ten years ago today, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then head of the Yukos Oil Company, was arrested in Russia and charged with multiple financial crimes. Mr. Khodorkovsky and his colleague Platon Lebedev remain in jail after being convicted in 2010 on new ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin faces a choice between political reform or social upheaval, jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky told RFI on the 10th anniversary of his arrest on tax evasion charges. Khodorkovsky's suporters believe he was punished for ...

On October 25, it will be ten years since a Russian SWAT team arrested oil tycoon
Mikhail Khodorkovsky in a Siberian airport. It was a watershed moment for Russia,
defining the Putin era as one in which the Russian oligarchs were subjugated to the Kremlin.

Russia should join NATO: the benefits for the Global Security are enormous

To reformulate Lord Ismay's phrase: 1) Take Russia in, 2) Continue keeping Germany down, 3) Assert and exercise the US leadership position within the NATO as a unifying and directing force and vector.

"Ловец Человеков"

Connected? The halo is there. And the Book is there. And the disciples are there. But where is the Light of Understanding, in this big curved dark tunnel of a vision? Where is the big red dot? Where is the new beginning?

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Hillary Clinton and rock group Pussy Riot

"Great to meet the strong & brave young women from #PussyRiot, who refuse to let their voices be silenced in #Russia. 1:09 PM - 4 Apr 2014" - Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton tweeted a picture Friday of her posing with members of the anti-Vladimir Putin punk rock group Pussy Riot. Clinton met with the women during the "Women in the World Summit" in New York. The group has emerged as chief opponents of Putin, and three members were jailed in 2012 after an anti-Putin performance at a church. The tweet has been re-tweeted almost 10,000 times.